Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian writer, thinker, philosopher, and publicist. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences from 1877. A classic of world literature and, according to UNESCO, one of the most widely read writers in the world.

He was born into the family of the chief physician of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. His father, Mikhail Andreevich, was a nobleman; his mother, Maria Fyodorovna, came from an old Moscow merchant family. He received an excellent education at the private boarding school of L. Tsermak, one of the best in Moscow. Reading was cherished in the family, and they subscribed to the journal Biblioteka dlya chteniya (“Library for Reading”), which made it possible to become acquainted with the latest foreign literature. Among Russian authors, they liked Karamzin, Zhukovsky, and Pushkin. His mother, a deeply religious woman, introduced the children to the Gospel from an early age and took them on pilgrimages to the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.

Having suffered deeply from the death of his mother (1837), Dostoevsky, by his father’s decision, entered the St. Petersburg Military Engineering School, one of the best educational institutions of the time. He found the new life extremely demanding of his strength, nerves, and ambition. But there was also another life—his inner, hidden life, unknown to those around him.

In 1839 his father unexpectedly died. This news shocked Dostoevsky and triggered a severe nervous attack, a forerunner of the epilepsy to which he had a hereditary predisposition.

He graduated from the school in 1843 and was assigned to service in the drafting office of the Engineering Department. A year later he resigned, convinced that his vocation was literature.

Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk, was written in 1845 and published by Nekrasov in the St. Petersburg Collection (1846). Belinsky proclaimed “the appearance... of an extraordinary talent...” He rated the stories The Double (1846) and The Landlady (1847) lower